Latest OVP Models and Virtual Prototype Software Release with iGen, Available Now

Oxford, United Kingdom, May 23, 2017 – Imperas Software Ltd., the leader in high-performance software simulation, today announced the availability of new Open Virtual Platforms (OVP) models for ARM, Imagination Technologies, RISC-V and Renesas processors, along with a new OVPsim software release including the iGen modeling tool.

Virtual Prototyping in Demonstrations of Software Development Using Continuous Integration and Jenkins, Debug and Test, and a Tutorial onLinux Bring Up on Heterogeneous Multiprocessor SoCs

Oxford, United Kingdom, May 22, 2017 – Imperas Software Ltd., the leader in high-performance software simulation, today announced their participation at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2017, inviting developers of electronic products to register for a demonstration of Imperas virtual platforms for embedded software and systems development, debug and test at the Imperas booth in the World of IoT pavilion, booth #521.

Mike Anderson here, an Engineer at Qualcomm Atheros, Inc. We recently posted a new open source project to Github that I’m pretty excited about, called boardfarm. It was created two years ago, and has been used daily to automatically flash new OpenWrt-based software and package files onto hardware, run basic sanity tests, and save results. It’s been a great help by catching kernel panics, memory leaks, networking bugs, and more.

When boardfarm is used along with continuous integration software, like the open source Jenkins, it becomes even more powerful because, for example, it can be triggered to run automatically every night to test new code. This allows issues to be caught immediately.

The name boardfarm originally came about because we setup several routers on one table to create a “farm” of devices. A “boardfarm” is really just a stable test bench setup. There are plenty of closed-source networking test benches that easily cost tens of thousands of dollars. Those devices usually use Virtual Machines connect to the LAN & WAN of routers and run networking tests. We’ve created a powerful alternative to that test equipment based on open-source solutions.

Using console/ssh servers and network-controlled electrical outlets, we made all these devices available remotely, over the local network. That allowed developers and testers in totally different cities to connect to the same routers and devices to test and debug issues.

A boardfarm for properly testing networking on a single OpenWrt router might look like this:

Here is an OpenWrt router (center), network-controlled power switch (upper-left) and inexpensive Linux computers connected to the LAN and WAN of the router for running networking tests. The power switch allows for resetting of the router remotely, for when it gets stuck – which often happens with cutting-edge software. The white ethernet cables connect to the local area network so that users can ssh to these devices. The third Raspberry PI computer (optional) shown in this example is being used as a console server to allow accessing the serial port of the router.

Basically, the Linux Computers (Raspberry PIs in the picture) connected to the router allow for networking tests like ping, curl, wget, iperf, and etc. For example, they can be used to run network traffic for hours (or days) to check the stability of the OpenWrt router.

All tests can be found in the “tests” directory of the project, and are written Python to be simple and readable, e.g:

They simply type commands on devices, and expect certain output. You might recognize “sendline” and “expect” – this is just the Pexpect library for typing commands and expecting certain output.

Anyway, many more examples and details can be found at the boardfarm project site. We hope you’ll have a chance to setup a farm, try out the OpenWrt tests, and join the fun as we continue to expand test suites and improve open source networking!

Recent Posts: BringYourOwnIT.com

With the recent news of a drone causing chaos at Gatwick airport, hacking IoT devices has resurfaced as a topic of discussion especially regarding the security issues should a multitude of devices be hacked. In the optimal situation, there is no way that anyone should be able to access, much less hijack, the critical functions […]

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Embedded World 2017 in Germany as I was invited to give a couple of presentations on the pioneering work we have been doing at the prpl Foundation with regards to the prplHypervisor™ and prplPUF™ APIs for securing IoT. As it turns out, IoT was the top line […]